Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

And Nautilus was the worst file manager I had ever laid my hands on (yes, even worse than the Mac OSes "F*" Finder).

I'm curious as to why you feel that way. I personally very much liked Nautilus: it didn't try to include a full kitchen-sink in its functionality, it just provided a clean view on my files, all the most important data about them and let me do all the most common operations on them quickly and without a hassle.

I'm curious as to why you feel that way. I personally very much liked Nautilus: it didn't try to include a full kitchen-sink in its functionality, it just provided a clean view on my files.....

I think it's been pretty clear that Nautilus has been running on empty for some time. It was a file manager that had a huge amount of investment put into it (Eazel, Helix code) for very little results. Evolution was another example, and as an aside they are two software projects that told me that Gnome collectively just wasn't sustainable.

The fact is that in a file manager people want to move and copy files around easily (pretty basic) and that means a certain amount of reasonable functionality and an interface for the purpose. Spatial browsing was and is quite simply not it and it is no surprise they had to move back. Handling multiple folders and devices to copy and move files is most certainly not 'advanced' functionality or providing the 'kitchen sink'. People have come to expect to be able to do some file management in open/save dialogues because it is just far easier than opening up another application or turning on a bunch of settings. People do that every day with Explorer on Windows and there is a reason why there is a burgeoning market in third-party file managers on the Mac.

I always get somewhat suspicious of people who use the phrase 'kitchen sink' or the word 'clean'. It either tells me that they're trying to cover up for shortcomings in a piece of software or they are not doing anything of very much use.